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mire
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
mire
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ As the country is at present face down in the mire, such a development could only have positive benefits for us all.
▪ His enemies had made false accusations against him and wanted to drag him through the mire.
▪ I was sinking fast in the mire of soft money.
▪ It will take a political Houdini escape trick to keep him from being sucked further into the mire.
▪ No one who had ever struggled in the mire as she had, could fail to understand.
▪ One outstanding local example was the Broyle in Ringmer, 2000 acres of scrub and clay mire, an old deer park.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Mire

Mire \Mire\ (m[imac]r), n. [AS. m[=i]re, m[=y]re; akin to D. mier, Icel. maurr, Dan. myre, Sw. myra; cf. also Ir. moirbh, Gr. my`rmhx.] An ant. [Obs.] See Pismire.

Mire

Mire \Mire\, n. [OE. mire, myre; akin to Icel. m?rr swamp, Sw. myra marshy ground, and perh. to E. moss.] Deep mud; wet, spongy earth.
--Chaucer.

He his rider from the lofty steed Would have cast down and trod in dirty mire.
--Spenser.

Mire crow (Zo["o]l.), the pewit, or laughing gull. [Prov. Eng.]

Mire drum, the European bittern. [Prov. Eng.]

Mire

Mire \Mire\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Mired (m[imac]rd); p. pr. & vb. n. Miring.]

  1. To cause or permit to stick fast in mire; to plunge or fix in mud; as, to mire a horse or wagon.

  2. Hence: To stick or entangle; to involve in difficulties; -- often used in the passive or predicate form; as, we got mired in bureaucratic red tape and it took years longer than planned.

  3. To soil with mud or foul matter.

    Smirched thus and mired with infamy.
    --Shak.

Mire

Mire \Mire\, v. i. To stick in mire.
--Shak.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
mire

c.1300, from a Scandinavian source such as Old Norse myrr "bog, swamp," from Proto-Germanic *miuzja- (source of Old English mos "bog, marsh"), from PIE *meus- "damp" (see moss).

mire

c.1400, in figurative sense of "to involve in difficulties," from mire (n.). Literal sense is from 1550s. Related: Mired; miring.

Wiktionary
mire

Etymology 1 n. 1 Deep mud; moist, spongy earth. 2 An undesirable situation, a predicament. vb. 1 To weigh down. 2 To cause or permit to become stuck in mud; to plunge or fix in mud. 3 To soil with mud or foul matter. Etymology 2

n. (context obsolete English) An ant.

WordNet
mire
  1. n. a soft wet area of low-lying land that sinks underfoot [syn: quagmire, quag, morass]

  2. v. entrap; "Our people should not be mired in the past" [syn: entangle]

  3. cause to get stuck as if in a mire; "The mud mired our cart" [syn: bog down]

  4. be unable to move further; "The car bogged down in the sand" [syn: grind to a halt, get stuck, bog down]

  5. soil with mud, muck, or mire; "The child mucked up his shirt while playing ball in the garden" [syn: muck, mud, muck up]

Wikipedia
Mire (disambiguation)

A mire is a kind of wetland.

Mire or Miré may also refer to:

  • Miré, a commune in France
  • Mire Loch, a Scottish body of water
  • Mire language, spoken in Chad, Africa
  • Mire Hagi Farah Mohamed, a Somali government minister
Mire

A mire or quagmire, sometimes called a peatland, is a wetland terrain without forest cover dominated by living, peat-forming plants. For botanists and ecologists, the term peatland is a more general term for any terrain dominated by peat to a depth of at least , even if it has been completely drained (i.e., a peatland can be dry, but a mire by definition must be wet).

There are two types of mire – fens and bogs. A bog is a domed-shaped land form, is higher than the surrounding landscape, and obtains most of its water from rainfall (i.e., is ombrotrophic) while a fen is located on a slope, flat, or depression and gets its water from both rainfall and surface water.

Also, while a bog is always acidic and nutrient-poor, a fen may be either slightly acidic, neutral or alkaline and either nutrient-poor or nutrient-rich. A mire is distinguished from a swamp by its lack of a forest canopy (though some bogs may support limited tree or bush growth, mires are dominated by grass and mosses), and from a marsh by its water nutrients and distribution (marshes are characterized by nutrient-rich stagnant or slow-moving waters; mire waters are located mostly below the soil surface level) as well as its plant life (marsh plants are generally submerged or floating-leaved; those in a mire are not).

Because mires rely on rainwater for nutrient input, they are usually deficient in both nitrogen and phosphorus, though they may vary widely with regard to nitrogen. These things mean that mires are a kind of "...living relic... [A] living skin on an ancient body" in which successive layers of regular plant growth and decay are preserved stratigraphically with a quality of preservation unknown in other wetland environments.

Usage examples of "mire".

In physique he closely resembled the Aliansa, being tall and robust and with a face less humanoid than the aborigines of the Mire and Mountain.

The aborigines have an overwhelming advantage in the Misty Mire during the Rains.

Not from the night, not from Mama or Papa, not from Deda and Babushka, far away, not from Babushka Maya, too old to care, not from Marina, who knew too much without knowing anything, not from Dimitri, who was mired in his own hell, and certainly not from Alexander, the impossible, maddening, unforgivable Alexander.

Dunlop with what pangs of heart he was compelled to take shelter in a corner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should mangle him in the mire.

Soon he stopped reading, placed one book on top of the other, and began to rock very slowly in the wicker rocking chair, contemplating with regret the banana plants in the mire of the patio, the stripped mango, the flying ants that came after the rain, the ephemeral splendor of another afternoon that would never return.

Confused, Gena looked to Mary, then down at the foul mire covering her gown.

Across the way, crawling along the barely visible wall of a shop front, hunching itself across the stone blocks as if mired in quicksand, was the guilt he felt at heeding no one but himself as he sought to vindicate both promise and belief a guilt that threatened to rise up and choke him.

Then he looked down at his tattered kaftan, which was mired with dirt, and tried to brush it clean, to button it, and to tie up the ragged threads of it.

To insist on thinking mechanistically, not heeding my own cautions about the follies of reductionism, means that the experiments are bound to end mired in paradox.

Other trade goods of the perverse little kingdom included valuable medicinal swamp herbs and kitchen spices, worrarn pelts and fedok skins, and certain curious ancient artifacts which the Oddlings procured from ruined cities deep in the most inaccessible reaches of the Mires.

Only the Oddlings ventured about the Mazy Mire then, by ways they knew and methods they had perfected many hundreds ago.

However, one way or another I intend to have Oddlings loyal to us comb the more remote parts of the Mazy Mire, where I know that there are hidden certain extraordinary magical machines of the Vanished Ones.

Blind Seer on the stoop, his fur spiked with mire and blood, his entire being reeking of filth.

For the mires expander and the converters, lowering, as they did, the mass of the flyer, eliminating inertia, fitted with the fusion engine of the Delanians as Rei fitted with Miaree.

Flanking the trade road, the terrain was mild, the hills lightly forested, with thin soil laid over slabbed granite unable to support stands of miring undergrowth.